My wife had her first mammogram last month.

There was a spot on the image. The doctor wanted a closer look.

So, a few days later, she had an ultrasound. She is fine.

But in the moments between "there is a spot" and "she is fine," I was secretly on edge.

Cancer kills. It doesn't discriminate.

My stepmother had breast cancer surgery last month. The doctors think they got it all. She begins radiation treatment soon.

Luckily, she has insurance. So do we.

That's not the case for thousands of women across the country who receive breast exams from Planned Parenthood and, when warranted, referrals for mammograms.

For a few days last week, it seemed that tens of thousands of those women could go without needed medical screenings because of reactionary politics.

Under pressure from anti-abortion zealots, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure charity had declared it would stop giving money to Planned Parenthood because one of many services that Planned Parenthood provides is abortions. National outrage was so swift and widespread that on Friday, Komen wisely reversed its decision and announced it would resume the funding. But now the zealots on the right might be even angrier.

Look, I get it. The passion on the abortion issue is real. I've only had one bumper sticker on a car in my life. It was my senior year in high school. In white, block lettering against a stark red background it read, "Abortion kills."

It does. I believe that.

But I also believe that most of the millions of women who have been served by the Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood over the years set aside politics. Further, the work Planned Parenthood does promoting sex education and contraception does more to reduce abortions than the political noise surrounding the issue.

If you forced me to answer, I couldn't tell you which presidential candidate my wife or my stepmother favor. Ditto for my aunt who beat cancer a couple of years back. And I have no idea the political persuasions of my aunt who succumbed to cancer last year after a long, painful battle.

Their politics don't matter. Cancer doesn't discriminate. Neither does Planned Parenthood.

Seattle poet Nicole Hardy brought that point home in a touching essay in The New York Times last January. The Mormon, who was a virgin until she was 36, explained her first visit to the women's health agency at age 35.

"How unprepared I was to experience tenderness in the place I had been warned so vehemently against," Ms. Hardy wrote. "How unprepared for the flood of relief, the bud of hope, after a life devoted to keeping myself separate from my body. Here was a path, an opening. Here was empathy."

Komen's original, short-sighted decision to abandon its partner in women's health ran the opposite of empathy. It was a path of division in a world plagued by too much of it.

In today's political world, there are no shades of gray for some. No nuance. No compromise. There is no room anymore for a sense of common purpose.

The real world is different. In that world, early detection saves the lives of all women, regardless of their creed, their color, their politics. That's the world where I end up every evening, in the loving arms of a woman who six months from now will have another mammogram to make sure a spot on an X-ray is still nothing.